On Thursday night, Trump attacked Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities. He said “There’s something going on” and started listing instances in which Biden garbled words or said the wrong thing.
On Saturday on Twitter, people started telling me that there was irrefutable evidence that Joe Biden was in cognitive decline. They told me that the evidence was apparent in Biden’s talk in Kansas City. So I found a local Kansas City news station which had a video of his entire talk. I listened to the entire thing. He sounded fine.
I tweeted this:
When literally dozens of people, including long time followers insisted that in fact, Biden is in decline, I threatened to block people for spreading vile rumors.
Next we learned that a list of Bernie Sanders Campaign Super Tuesday talking points was (supposedly) distributed to his followers. The talking points included the statement that Joe Biden was in cognitive decline.
The Sanders campaign denied that it was theirs. Nonetheless, literally thousands of Sanders supporters were gleefully spreading the rumor on Twitter.
Notice what a neat trick Trump pulled. Trump spread a lie and made it sound like it was coming from Team Sanders. Sanders supporters take the bait and spread the lie. Trump accomplished three things:
- He spread the lie about Biden
- He made Sanders supporters look bad
- He got the Democrats fighting each other
Win-win-win.
Joe Biden does have a stutter, which consequently sometimes gets in the way of speaking.
This is not a cognitive disability.
A number of speech specialists wrote threads and commentary about how people with stutters work around them, and that Biden does remarkably well.
Let me repeat: A stutter is not a cognitive disability.
The clip, which was viewed more than 5.8 million times and retweeted more than 34,000 times as of Sunday morning at 10 AM, showed Biden struggling with a line in his Saturday speech in Kansas City, Missouri, then saying, “Excuse me. We can only re-elect Donald Trump.”
Even after this information was available, people continued spreading the lie.
Here we have it coming from Jill Stein:
Here’s Kyle Kulinski, a person with 300K followers on Twitter:
Here’s Glenn Greenwald with 1.4 million followers:
Now here’s actor John Cusack, who has 1.6 million followers:
This is a coordinated, targeted smear campaign launched by Trump and picked up by Sanders supporters.
It worked. I received a blitz of Tweets like this one:
Facts:
- Biden has a stutter
- Videos of Biden are being maliciously edited
- Sanders supporters are hurting Sanders by participating in a disinformation campaign
- We should be promoting empathy for dealing with a stutter
Consider how easy it was: Doctor a video, tweet it out, and watch it go viral.
Also consider how damaging a whisper campaign like this can be. People who hear it feel a nagging doubt. (I went and listened to the full Kansas City talk to make sure.)
Any slight misstep, any ripple in Biden’s ordinarily calm surface, any evidence of stutter will cause people to think “but. . .” This is what the GOP did with “her emails.” There as no crime. There was nothing wrong. But when you repeat something often enough, people wonder.
After Biden’s big wins in Michigan, Mississippi, and Missouri, Biden gave this speech:
Even after Biden gave this speech, people on Twitter were still spreading the rumor that he is in serious decline.
People worry about lots of things on Twitter. They worry about hackers flipping votes. They worry about Trump cancelling the election. They worry about Trump refusing to concede power if he loses.
Meanwhile, they are being blitzed by a dangerous and effective disinformation campaign–and many of them fall for it.
The most dangerous problem facing the country right now is that the President of the United States is waging a full on disinformation war against the citizens of the country, and people either (1) fall for it or (2) knowingly repeat misinformation if they think it will benefit them.
How is (2) any different from Trump and his supporters?
We need to be better than that.
